It is nearly a century since the Midland Grand hotel, the Victorian palace attached to St Pancras station, last flourished, and 76 years since it was a hotel at all. It is almost a half-century since the struggle began to rescue it from oblivion, 26 years since it had any full-time use and five since construction started to return it to its original purpose as a luxury hotel, now with some apartments attached. On 14 March the first guests will enter the St Pancras Renaissance hotel, as it is now called, where the rooms will cost from £250 a night in a modern extension, up to the many-roomed Royal Suite for £10,000. It will have cost £200m of construction to get this far.
Meanwhile, it has stood, like the weird house of a crazy old lady in some village, unmissable, spooky and inaccessible. The life of the city swirls around it and under it, in and out of some of the busiest train and underground stations in Europe. It has been possible to see inside on the occasional tour, and its interiors have been shown worldwide to unknowing millions, as locations for Harry Potter, 102 Dalmatians, Batman, Richard III and other films requiring lavish gothic creepiness. Now, its restoration nearly complete, it feels like both a lost world and something familiar, that has always been part of the furniture of London.
Inside, it is a thing of movement, a web of stairs and endless corridors. Even the coffee room, one of its most splendid interiors, is built on a radiused curve, like a railway viaduct, as if you had not quite left a train carriage. Then, as if unsettled by instability, it is fixed with history. Medieval architecture is imported by the hundreds of tons, to ballast the risky Victorian world of capital and industry, of bank crashes and train crashes.
Palaces and churches are evoked with pointed arches and ogees, bunches of colonettes, carvings of flowers and fruit, trefoils and quatrefoils. The materials include granite, alternating pink and white stone and wrought iron. The decoration, as it would have been in medieval buildings, is as dazzling as it can be: within a square foot or two, you can find royal blue, vermilion, gold, green, pink and a mustardy yellow. Great floral splodges march across the wallpaper like space invaders. Its looping, swooping, theatrical main staircase is decorated with 2,300 fleurs-de-lis. There are paintings of the Virtues and of a chaste love scene from the Roman de la Rose, perhaps antidotes to the potential lustfulness of a hotel.
It is both magnificent and a little demented. With its churchy aura, it feels uncomfortable with its own hedonism. Although its imagery is of nature and springtime, it feels a touch clammy and stifling. While admiring it, you can see why people in the early 20th century reacted against this kind of thing, in favour of simpler, fresher, less pretentious spaces.
When it was completed, the Midland Grand was the last and grandest of the railway hotels built to serve passengers at major termini and to act as an advertisement for them. It was designed for the Midland Railway by the prolific George Gilbert Scott, architect of dozens of churches, Glasgow University, the Albert Memorial and the Foreign Office, and for whom the project was the fulfilment of his greatest dream, to design a great gothic public building in London. For him, the making of this monument went beyond mere uses; it was almost “too good for its purpose,” he said.
Its innovations included lifts, fireproof construction and a generous supply of flushing lavatories, but these were not enough to defend it from the competition when newer hotels introduced things the Midland Grand did not have, such as ensuite bathrooms. In the 20th century, it declined, until it closed in 1935. After the war, it housed various offices of British Rail, which carved up its interiors with partitions and suspended ceilings. Seen as obsolete, inefficient and tasteless, it was threatened with demolition. It took campaigns by John Betjeman and others to save both the hotel and the great shed of St Pancras station – now the Eurostar terminus – behind.
Its eventual rescue is the work of Harry Handelsman and his property company, Manhattan Loft Corporation, London and Continental Railways and Marriott Hotels, working with the architects RHWL and Richard Griffiths, and the close attention of English Heritage. The prodigiously successful hedge-fund manager (Lord) Stanley Fink put many of his millions behind it. Of all these, the driving force is Handelsman, for whom it has become an obsession. He increased his stake when other partners fell away, nervous of a complicated, risky project in an unproved location. Now he describes himself as the “custodian” of the building.
He freely admits that the budget “spiralled” and wears the cost as a badge of honour. When a fragment of rare wallpaper was found in one room, it was reinstated at a cost of £47,000 for the single room. He says that he “wanted to go the extra mile, even though it cost tens of millions”. He is confident that he will “recoup his investment, because it will be the most beautiful hotel in London”. His cheerful air suggests he is not being driven to bankruptcy by an architectural folly.
The genius of the project lies in its deal-making and risk-taking, the stacking up of partnerships, funding and uses such that it can, for the first time since the early 1920s, be a going concern. It has cost no public money since English Heritage supported the restoration of the exterior in the early 1990s.
With this history go some compromises. The restoration lacks an overall concept of how the old relates to the new, such as was possible, for example, in the state-funded, not-for-profit Neues Museum in Berlin. It feels more like a series of individual decisions than something with a guiding intelligence. A new wing to the rear, housing 189 bedrooms, is clad in a modern version of Scott’s red-brick gothic by restoration specialists Richard Griffiths Architects. This is among the best of its kind, confident and not completely imitative, but it sits oddly with the modern, standardised block it covers.
The relationship with Marriott, which vetted every detail from its headquarters in Washington DC, causes awkwardness, as the corporate world seems to have lost its taste for fantasy since the days of the Midland Railway. Sometimes, Scott’s individualism collides with ubiquitous international hoteliana. Worst is the fitted carpet in the corridors, whose architecture demands something with a less domestic quality: it is like socks worn with a ballgown and its space-killing squishiness makes my flesh creep.
But these are details compared to the far more significant fact that one of the country’s architectural marvels is returning to life. That it is doing so, after so many decades and obstacles, shows the power of fantasy in cities. Usually, everyone bemoans building projects that take a long time and run over budget, but here nobody, not even those writing the cheques, seems to mind.
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